In the summer of 1968, a voice floated out of radios across Britain, Europe, and North America carrying a melody that felt both brand new and strangely familiar. Listeners who had never studied Russian music and had no connection to the early twentieth century somehow felt they had heard something like it before. That feeling was not accidental.

The song is “Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin, released in August 1968 on Apple Records.

Boris Fomin’s Russian Romance Melody

To understand what made “Those Were the Days” feel timeless from the very first listen, it helps to go back several decades before Mary Hopkin ever sang a note of it.

The melody at the heart of the song was written by a Russian composer named Boris Fomin. Born in 1900, Fomin worked in the tradition of the Russian romance — a genre of lyrical, emotionally expressive song that had been popular in Russia since the nineteenth century. These were not folk songs in the rough, unpolished sense. They were crafted pieces, often built around themes of lost youth, passing time, longing, and memory. The feelings in them were universal even when the language was not.

Fomin wrote his melody in the early 1920s, setting it to words by a poet named Konstantin Podrevsky. The song became known as Dorogoi dlinnoyu, a phrase that translates roughly as “along the long road” or “by the long road.” It carried that particular kind of Russian melancholy that does not feel hopeless so much as deeply reflective — the kind of mood that comes from looking back at something beautiful that has passed.

The original words are not what English-speaking audiences came to know in 1968. The Russian text and the later English version share the same melody and the same emotional atmosphere, but they are not translations of each other. They are two separate sets of words built on the same musical foundation, separated by roughly forty years and an entire ocean.

Early Recordings in the 1920s

During the 1920s, Dorogoi dlinnoyu found its way onto recordings in Russia, and the song began to travel. Russian émigré communities had scattered across Europe and the United States following the revolution, and with them went the music of the culture they had left behind. The Russian romance was one of the art forms those communities carried carefully into their new lives, performing and recording it in concert halls, small clubs, and drawing rooms far from Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Early recordings of the song helped preserve the melody through the decades that followed. It passed through different singers, different arrangements, and different settings without losing the essential quality that made it affecting. A melody that can survive that kind of travel and that kind of time tends to carry something genuinely durable inside it.

For most of the twentieth century, the song was known primarily within communities that already had a connection to Russian musical tradition. It was not a secret, but it had not yet found its way into the mainstream pop world that would eventually make it one of the best-selling singles of 1968.

Gene Raskin Writes New English Words

The bridge between Boris Fomin’s 1920s melody and Mary Hopkin’s 1968 recording was built by an American folk singer, architect, and songwriter named Gene Raskin.

Raskin encountered the melody and recognized its potential. Rather than translating the original Russian words, he wrote an entirely new English lyric that captured a similar emotional territory — nostalgia, the memory of a time when life felt wide open, the particular ache of looking back at youthful days from a distance. His words gave the melody a life in English that felt natural and emotionally honest rather than forced or approximate.

Raskin and his wife Francesca performed the song as part of their folk act in Europe through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. They played in venues in London and Paris, and the song built a small, quiet reputation among audiences who appreciated that kind of intimate, storytelling performance. It was not yet a pop record. It was a folk performance piece, passed carefully from stage to stage.

That could easily have been the end of the story. A well-traveled melody with a thoughtful English lyric, known in certain circles, appreciated by those who heard it live, but never quite breaking through to a wider audience. Then came 1968, and everything changed.

Paul McCartney Produces Mary Hopkin

Mary Hopkin was a seventeen-year-old singer from Wales when she appeared on the British television talent program Opportunity Knocks in 1968 and caught the attention of the fashion model Twiggy, who recommended her to Paul McCartney. McCartney had recently helped launch Apple Records as part of The Beatles’ new business venture, and he was looking for artists whose voices had something genuinely distinctive to offer.

He heard Hopkin’s voice and believed she could carry a song with real emotional weight. The question was which song. When “Those Were the Days” came to his attention — a melody with that unmistakable quality of sounding both contemporary and ancient — McCartney recognized what it could become in the right hands.

He produced the recording himself. What Hopkin brought to the studio was a voice that was clear, warm, and unforced, with a folk-like naturalness that suited the song perfectly. She was not performing in the overwrought style that might have made the song feel theatrical. She simply sang it, and the melody did the rest.

The single was released in late August 1968, just as The Beatles were releasing “Hey Jude” on the same label. “Those Were the Days” reached number one in the United Kingdom and climbed high on charts in the United States, Australia, and across Europe. It became one of the best-selling singles of that year worldwide, an extraordinary achievement for a debut record by a teenager from Wales carrying a melody that had been composed in Moscow nearly half a century earlier.

The Unusual Instrumental Arrangement

Part of what made Mary Hopkin’s recording feel unlike almost anything else on the radio in 1968 was the arrangement created by Richard Hewson. Rather than reaching for the standard pop instrumentation of the era, Hewson built the sound around instruments that were largely unfamiliar to mainstream pop audiences.

The recording featured a cimbalom — a hammered dulcimer associated with Eastern European and Russian musical traditions — alongside clarinet and other instruments that gave the track a distinctly old-world texture. These were not the sounds of a typical British pop production. They were the sounds of a different musical world, carefully woven into a recording that was going to be played on modern radio.

That choice turned out to be exactly right. The unusual instrumentation reinforced the song’s sense of distance — the feeling that you were hearing something from another place and another time, not just another pop record made last Tuesday. It gave the recording an atmosphere that was genuinely hard to categorize, which may be one of the reasons it connected with so many different kinds of listeners in so many different countries at once.

The cimbalom in particular gave the recording a sound that listeners might not have been able to name but could immediately feel. It added something slightly haunting, slightly foreign, and entirely appropriate for a song about looking back at days that cannot be recovered.

A Melody That Traveled Further Than Anyone Expected

What the story of “Those Were the Days” demonstrates, more than almost any other pop hit of its era, is how music moves across time and borders in ways that no one fully plans.

Boris Fomin wrote a melody in 1920s Russia that suited the emotional world of the Russian romance tradition. It was carried out of Russia by people who loved it and needed it. Gene Raskin found it decades later in Europe and heard something in it worth giving new English words. Those words traveled through folk venues from London to Paris for years. Then a seventeen-year-old Welsh singer recorded it for a brand-new record label run by a Beatle, with an arranger who reached for a cimbalom when everyone else was reaching for electric guitars.

Every step in that journey was unlikely. And yet the song arrived, fully formed, on radios in 1968 as if it had always been heading there.

Some songs belong to a year. Some belong to a generation. And some — the ones built on melodies that carry real human feeling through every change of language, arrangement, and era — belong to something longer than either. “Those Were the Days” is one of those songs. It began on a long road in 1920s Russia, and it has not stopped traveling since.